Passive Crowd-Based Monitoring of World Wide Web Infrastructure and Its Performance

The World Wide Web and the services it provides are continually evolving. Even for a single time instant, it is a complex task to methodologically determine the infrastructure over which these services are provided and the corresponding effect on user perceived performance. For such tasks, researchers typically rely on active measurements or large numbers of volunteer users. In this paper, the authors consider an alternative approach, which they refer to as passive crowd-based monitoring. More specifically, they use passively collected proxy logs from a global enterprise to observe differences in the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by users on different continents.